SEOUL, March 19, 2010 (AFP) - French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner criticised on Friday excessive bank profits following the global slump and said tougher financial regulations would be the key issue at this year's G20 summit.
    "Look at the profit of the banking sector this year following the crisis: this is unacceptable. We must be strongly determined to balance this within the G20," Kouchner said in a wide-ranging speech in South Korea that also addressed relations with Pyongyang.
    "The most important issue of the G20 will be what are we going to accept in terms of regulation of the financial sector."
    South Korea hosts a summit of the Group of 20 leading global economies in November, with France taking over the chair next year.
    "This (regulation) is a very difficult issue that will require political will," added Kouchner, hinting at persistent differences among G20 members.
    Kouchner also urged South Korea and other Asian countries to support French efforts to set up an international tax on financial transactions aimed at helping developing countries.
    "We need fresh money. And we will not raise the necessary funds without creating new financial mechanisms," said Kouchner, who was the founder of French non-governmental organisation Doctors without Borders.
    "France cannot achieve this alone. This will be possible only if Korea, Asia and Africa join us," he told an audience of diplomats and students at Seoul National University.
    Kouchner, who later met President Lee Myung-Bak and Foreign Minister Yu Myung-Hwan, also slammed North Korea's rights record and denounced its cooperation with Middle Eastern regimes on weapons of mass destruction.
    "Through this relentless cooperation with countries in the Middle East, Pyongyang exports seeds of insecurity," the minister said in his speech on global and regional crisis management.
    Kouchner arrived from Japan, where he had rapped the Pyongyang regime for developing a weapons programme while its people suffer desperate poverty.
    He said in Tokyo Thursday that France would not open diplomatic relations with North Korea but plans to establish an office there to support non-governmental groups.
    In his Seoul speech, he called for an improvement in inter-Korean ties and denounced Pyongyang's restrictions on border crossings.
    "I founded Doctors without Borders but today I am afraid to say that doctors can not cross the border up to the North. This is unacceptable."